Pelléas et Mélisande, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 3 July 2026

Images: Tatjana Dachsel (from an earlier revival, with a different cast)

Golaud – Simon Keenlyside
Mélisande – Magdalena Kožená
Pelléas – Thomas Blondelle
Geneviève – Anne Sofie von Otter
Arkel – Stephen Milling
Yniold – Henrik Brandstetter
Doctor, Shepherd – David Oštrek

Director – Ruth Berghaus
Revival director – Katharina Lang
Designs – Hartmut Meyer

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

When, all too briefly, I lived in Berlin Mitte, I would regularly take a short walk, often mid-afternoon, to the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof. Taking their place in the firmament of great Berliners buried there, from Fichte and Hegel onwards, are Ruth Berghaus and Paul Dessau, director and composer in a properly Brechtian line. (From the house next to the cemetery, Brecht looked down at the graves of his predecessors, later joining them, and being joined by Helene Weigel.) It is little exaggeration to say that Berghaus saved the Berliner Ensemble from the mortmain of Brecht’s heirs, only to be replaced with their connivance and that of the ruling Socialist Unity Party. Berghaus’s most celebrated or at least most concentrated work in opera followed that period, when she worked with Michael Gielen in the 1980s at the Frankfurt Opera. Sadly, almost nothing of her opera work survives on film, but three or four productions remain in the repertoire: this Berlin Pelléas et Mélisande, her delightful Barber of Seville (also Berlin), Tristan und Isolde (Hamburg), and possibly Elektra (Mannheim).

The Pelléas was seen first in 1991, conducted by none other than Gielen; subsequent conductors have included Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle, and now François-Xavier Roth. This was its forty-third appearance performance at the Staatsoper: perhaps less than one might expect for so enduring a staging – compare that with over 350 for the Barber – but then the subtlety, depth, and absolute refusal to play to the gallery of Debussy’s opera have never appealed to sections of the operatic masses. (I once heard someone dismiss it as ‘boring’.) So much the worse for them. If they would not have been converted by this, then I suspect it would ever elude them; after all, we all have blind (deaf?) spots. The only sense in which Berghaus’s staging seems a little dated is perhaps in aspects of Hartmut Meyer’s designs: on reflection, not so much ‘dated’ as not quite of our time. Had I looked at them innocently, I might have guessed early twenty-first century rather than 1991. But they still function with great power as part of a musicodramatic whole, as if Roth and his cast had been involved from the outset: an astonishing achievement, when you think about it.

Like her fellow directors Harry Kupfer (now also in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof), Götz Friedrich (across the city in Zehlendorf), and Joachim Herz (in Leipzig, as one might expect), Berghaus was a student of that great adoptive Berliner Walter Felsenstein (miles away at Kloser, on the Baltic island of Hiddensee). They may have departed from Felsenstein in post-Brechtian interpretation, but they all built upon his equal concern for musical and dramatic elements (insofar as they may be separated at all). It is perhaps no coincidence that their stagings, where they survive, have often proved especially enduring. Or perhaps it is, for the sell-by-date of a staging stands in a complex relationship to its initial qualities. Nothing, ultimately, is forever—and some wonderful things can prove ultimately ephemeral.

 

Not this, in any case—and there must surely be something in the production, as well as in the intelligence and craft of those reviving it, that enables such integrated results even now. One certainly notices the stark colours, quasi-abstract yet never cold, from the outset, and one soon becomes emotionally and intellectually involved in the Allemonde they create. The lighting, for whom I can find no one directly credited, is at least as important and, if anything, still more powerful. The shadows it creates are terrifying, and all will attest to the dramatic role, literal and metaphorical, of shadow worlds in this opera. The near-stratospherically vertiginuous staircase, representing Mélisande’s tower far more directly than any more realistic attempt I have seen, provides sceno-dramatic focus for so much and offers terror of its own. Much is invested in every walk up and down, every place and occasion to take a seat, and the rest. Likewise Yniold’s ball: a childish toy, an object of motion, and something to follow Mélisande’s ring into the menacing well. Her deliberate, not careless, tossing of that ring early on into those depths offers a rare, momentary instance of lightness, even humour, albeit set within the ever-ominous, increasingly terrifying workings of Fate. 

Costumes and their apparent meaning, or at least amenability to be read, play intriguing balancing acts: a hint, perhaps of the Brechtian commedia dell’arte we know from Berliner Ensemble and Barber alike, but turned both early-French and symbolist. At times, Pelléas and Golaud appear almost interchangeable; at others, characters and situations win through and make their similar costumes irrelevant. The role of letters, their reading, and their consequences, becomes more concrete when they appear in large form, passed from character to character, and at times pinned on the wall (again, perhaps a Brechtian inheritance, but one transformed by another great artist at work). There is a strong feminist element too: Golaud’s rape of Mélisande horrifying, her pregnancy almost intolerably vivid (without male-gaze exploitation); and at least as disturbing as anything else, Arkel’s pursuit and lying with her, founded in the text but extended with well-nigh perfect directorial judgement.

The Staatskapelle Berlin has long experience of Debussy under Barenboim in particular. Roth’s reading brought similar structural virtues and alertness to colour, the later inevitably of a somewhat different nature, founded in his work with period instruments on this work. Wisely, there was no attempt merely to replicate that; we can all do without ever hearing ‘period style on modern instruments’ ever again. But that does not mean music-making, like theatre, cannot, or should not, be in a more intelligent sense ‘historically informed’. Timbre here played as important a structural role as anything else, pointing the way forward to Boulez, as malevolent harmonies, their progression, dramatic implication, and structural role led back to multiple Wagner dramas. Throughout the playing of the Staatskapelle was at least as outstanding as one could hope to hear anywhere.

 

Simon Keenlyside made the transition from Pelléas to Golaud a while ago, and continues to excel in this music and its drama (or should it be the other way around?) His triangle with Thomas Blondelle and Magdalena Kožená was as credible, revealing, and terrifying as any I can recall. Blondelle may have been indisposed, yet his Pelléas was fresh, alert, vivid and, listening between the lines, doomed. Kožená’s typically intelligent artistry, founded in profound communicative gifts, not least in French, proved almost horrifyingly moving. Anne Sofie von Otter’s Geneviève presided with similar intelligence—and perhaps the occasional hint of her youth and its travails. Stephen Milling’s Arkel was subtly yet powerfully sketched: a fascinating, compelling move from Hunding. No wonder Henrik Brandstetter’s Yniold received such warm and vigorous applause; so excellent was this performance from a soloist of the Tölzer Knabenchor, I confess I thought he must have been an adult singer successfully aping a treble. Even the small roles of Doctor and Shepherd were memorably assumed by David Oštrek.

This, then, was a highly moving and thought-provoking night in the theatre: in itself and for the questions it posed about stagings and their aesthetics, lineage, and longevity. I must try to see that Hamburg Tristan before it is too late.

BPO/Roth - Žuraj and Bruckner, 19 May 2024

Philharmonie

Vito Žuraj: Anemoi
Bruckner: Symphony no.3 in D minor (first version, 1873)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

 

Image: Monika Rittershaus

What to do on the evening between Siegfried and Götterdämmerung? Saner souls might take a night off. Yours truly opted for the light relief of heading to the Philharmonie in a new work by Vito Žuraj and Bruckner’s Third Symphony, in performances from the Berlin Philharmonic and François-Xavier Roth. I am glad I did so too, for those performances were excellent, introducing an excellent new work for large orchestra, commissioned by that orchestra, in only its second performance (the first having taken place the night before), alongside a reassessment of a (to me) flawed repertoire work that made more sense of it than any other I have heard. 

Žuraj’s Anemoi takes its name and inspiration from the Greek wind gods, children of the dawn goddess Eos and the god of dusk, Astraeus. Over its roughly twenty-five minutes, what is effectively a modern tone-poem introduced us to these gods as winds: less, I think, their effect (though we felt that) as the winds themselves. It offered a master-class in use of every section of the orchestra, various combinations of instruments employed as if this were a concerto for orchestra, or perhaps a concerto grosso, unfurling power all the greater when they came together in a storm, gods at work in their usual battling. It felt almost as if we were the land, receiving due battering—and less often, due benefit (closing raindrops a case in point). Sheer busy-ness of trumpets in one section, multiple uses to which trombones might be put, lyra sounds such as I had never heard from the harp, and evocation of the aulos in the opening, microtonally fracturing unison of oboes, cor anglaise included: these and more were impressive in themselves, but more importantly conveyed a narrative of melody, rhythm, harmony, timbre, counterpoint, and more. Fantastically assured, it was no mere ‘showpiece’. Roth’s precision and that of the orchestra were, properly, means to an ‘expressive’ end, not ends in themselves. 

I had more or less given up on Bruckner’s Third Symphony, whichever version it was presented in. Roth’s direction had me hooked from the truly misterioso opening of the first movement, solo trumpet and strangely translucent orchestra drawing one in. There was certainly all the orchestral depth one could wish for when called for; traditional orchestral ‘choirs’ were likewise present and correct. Nothing, though, was taken for granted. This felt like an exciting exploration, Mendelssohn and even Berlioz (perhaps via Liszt and Bruckner) behind, another world in front. If, sceptic that I partly remain, I do not always find the first movement material especially memorable, harmonically and even melodically, its presentation made good, even logical sense. And if I wished that Bruckner, however anachronistically, might have learned a little from Žuraj’s or even Wagner’s more varied use of brass, there was no doubting the excellence of the playing. A songful meeting of Schubert and Wagner – Tristan and Tannhäuser in particular – characterised the second movement, whose compelling performance had me almost forget its occasional melodic awkwardness. 

Roth’s tempo for Bruckner’s scherzo proved a revelation. A faster pace again suggested roots in Mendelssohn. Of course, the latter composer rightly remained some way off; this is hardly fairy-land. But kinship was apparent and convincing. The trio’s good humour and grace were welcome; taken like this, there was never a suspicion of lumbering. With that in mind, the proportional tempo adopted for the beginning of the finale made excellent musical and dramatic sense. I confess to having failed – still – to comprehend the logic of where Bruckner takes us next. Perhaps I am still guilty of listening to this too much as if it were Brahms, and of holding it responsible for being something it does not aspire to be. Nonetheless, this excellent performance made me hear the score as never before, even revealing Bruckner who can dance rather than stomp. It also made me all the keener to hear Roth conduct Wagner.

 

Neuburger/Boulez Ensemble/Roth - Debussy and Manoury, 29 October 2023

Pierre Boulez Saal

Debussy: Sonata for flute, viola, and harp
Manoury: Passacaille pour Tokyo
Debussy: Sonata for cello and piano
Manoury: Grammaires du sonore

Jean-Frédéric Neuburger (piano)

Boulez Ensemble

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

Images: Jakob Tillmann

Intelligent and revealing programming is always a joy. François-Xavier Roth ranks highly among those conductors regularly offering it. When married to equally intelligent and revealing performances it becomes all the more a joy, such as in this concert from the Boulez Ensemble, founded by Daniel Barenboim to include members of the Staatskapelle Berlin and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Two ensemble pieces by Philippe Manoury were prefaced by two late Debussy sonatas, the formal implications of which were highly suggestive and felt to be such for the Manoury works. 

First, we heard Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola, and harp, an extraordinary work I do not think I have ever heard live before. The combination may be unusual, but surely is not that difficult to assemble; even if it were, it would be well worth the effort. Hélène Freyburger (flute), Yulia Deyneka (viola), and Aline Khouri (harp) struck an ideal balance from the outset between solo and ensemble. The first movement in particular was possessed of a magical inscrutability through which secrets were gradually revealed, first among them the quiet radicalism of Debussy’s reinvention of the sonata, quite without resort to what would become (arguably was just becoming) neoclassicism. For Debussy’s treatment of material already began to peer forward to Boulez and even to Manoury. The Interlude, somehow both darker and brighter, registered with proper contrast. Debussy’s use of the harp fascinated all the more in performance, as it encouraged the viola and, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, the harp to expand their means, and initiated transformations of material and mood. Likewise in the finale, beginning in almost ‘classical’ style before taking other paths, not necessarily sequential: another anticipation of the future, bringing Birtwistle as well as Boulez to my mind.

 

The piano moved centre-stage to Manoury’s 1994 Passacaille pour Tokyo, for piano and seventeen instruments. A similar reinvention of an old form, albeit with more overt éclat, is here founded upon repetition of a note, first E-flat, to which we feel a need to return and indeed continue to hear even when the actual note of repetition has changed. It offers proliferation in a way that recalls Boulez, as it were, from the other end, without the slightest sense of mere imitation. Jean-Frédéric Neuburger’s insistence on the initial E-flat, varying duration and attack, set the scene for an excellent performance of the whole. Manoury’s music glittered and glistened, never glowering, in a fantastical realm of invention. I had a sense of constant transformation even when, on a single hearing, I could not always tell you how, but the relation of this new passacaglia-idea to the old piano device of a pedal-point (or more than one) became clearer as time progressed, all the while as material was thrilling passed between instruments, like high-speed Webern, though in many more directions. The advent of ‘shadow piano’, played offstage by Kyoko Nojima, was arresting in more than a merely spatial sense. Inevitably, perhaps, it died away on a single pitch, on Neuburger’s piano, but the abiding memory was as much of the delightful friction between repetition, even varying repetition, and persistent transformation above.

 

Neuburger was joined by cellist Alexander Kovalev for Debussy’s Cello Sonata, a dark, declamatory piano opening both picked up and transformed by cello playing (and writing) combining strength and elegy. Here was another different conception of the sonata, as if to remind us that Liszt’s declaration that new wine demanded new bottles was the afternoon’s motto; in many ways indeed it was. The variety of expressive articulation offered by both players, even within a single phrase, encapsulated not only a marriage of detail and greater sweep but also the concert’s conception of form springing from material. Pierrot-like whimsy and invention characterised the opening of the ‘Sérénade et Finale’. The mutual approach of instruments, for instance through piano marcato and cello pizzicato, prepared the way for a sense of controlled intoxication; that is, there were certainly limits, yet within those limits, a great deal could and did happen. Not unlike Manoury’s Passacaille, one might say.

 

Barenboim arrived after the interval, with what I assume was the score of the next piece, which he proceeded to follow assiduously seated next to the composer. Manoury’s Grammaires du sonore was premiered by Roth and the Ensemble Intercontemporain last December in Paris. It made a huge impression on me here in Berlin—and, so far as I could tell, on the audience assembled at the Pierre Boulez Saal. A fuller ensemble here seemed not only to reinvent the modern ensemble’s reinvention of the symphony orchestra, but also, more radically, not only to question but magically to cast away its hierarchies in a riot of what went beyond Debussy’s controlled intoxication to post-Boulezian controlled delirium. Here, it seemed, there was a place for all to shine, democratically if you will, one of the first being Nina Janßen-Deinzer on contrabass clarinet, the piece seeming to fulfil or at least to renew a promise serialism had never quite been able to realise. Precision and fantasy were dialectically related, as in Boulez. Particular to the piece rather than a universal (was tonality ever really that in any case?), Manoury’s ‘grammar’ both demonstrated and enabled every note, like every word in a poem, truly to count. The fascination of that idea and the excitement of its putting in practice turned our attention back where it should always have been, to musical notes, their performance, their connection, and our listening. For the expression of musical imagination was both highly dramatic and readily perceptible.

Tuned percussion also brought Boulez, perhaps inevitably, a little to mind, yet Manoury’s writing was quite different: less elliptical, perhaps also freer in its exchanged with untuned fellow citizens. Piano writing and Nojima’s performance were perhaps a little closer to ‘traditional’ expectations than what we had heard in the Passacaille, but that was no failing, no retreat, perhaps rather a sign of confidence in the instrument and its place in the ensemble. Brass, save the Wagner tuba, left the floor and went up to the balconies, ricocheting of notes in a layered spatiality expanding dimensions of the relationship between repeated notes and invention in the earlier work. Strings too seemed liberated by their new role, not as first among equals but simply as equals, scintillating, soulful, and much in between, sometimes merging into other sections in an aesthetic and perhaps not entirely apolitical utopia of sound. One chord seemed almost to approach ‘that’ chord in the Adagio of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. It was probably just my fancy, to be refuted were I to look at the score or listen again; yet, in the construction of a grammar to what Mahler might have considered a new world in itself, perhaps it was not entirely so. Debussy’s rethinking of form was honoured and extended, but above all this world dazzled and exhilarated. Crucially for us all now, it held out the promise of life, of a future, of the reinvention, reimagining, and rebuilding we desperately need: not through a didactic manifesto, but through music's delight in itself.

Kopatchinskaja/LSO/Roth - Ligeti and Beethoven, 16 February 2023

Barbican Hall

Ligeti, arr. Elgar Howarth: Macabre Collage (UK premiere)
Ligeti: Violin Concerto
Beethoven: Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67

Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)

London Symphony Orchestra

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

Image: Mark Allan

  

György Ligeti will turn 100 on 28 May. Let us hope for many performances as excellent as this in celebration of perhaps the most abidingly concert-hall-popular of postwar musical modernists. First, François-Xavier Roth conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Elgar Howarth’s 2021 revision of his 1991 ‘collage’ from Le Grand Macabre. From the anarchic Monteverdi hommage of the opening, L’Orfeo’s Toccata revisited via twelve car-horns, to the closing passacaglia with swing, here to my ears slightly suggestive of Kurt Weill, Ligeti’s ‘anti-anti-opera’ or ‘comic apocalypse’ splendidly hit the absurdist spot of would-be annihilation in edited, wordless version. (If ever we needed a return to Breugelland, it is surely during our current NATO-Putin-Zelensky standoff.) Was that an allusion I heard early on to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? Perhaps, perhaps not. Does it matter? Again, one can argue either way. A musical melodrama of drumroll and offstage trombone set the, or at least a, drama proper in motion, Death drunkenly fiddling offstage, having us both fear and ridicule him, caught in the headlines of a Fate Ligeti (and Beethoven) may or may not have summoned. The space was used resourcefully throughout, an E-flat clarinet peeking out from a hole in the wall that suggests, yet does not contain, an organ, various tricks beguiling and distracting as commedia dell’arte met something approaching music theatre. A tango-ish Rite, or just a rite? Hard-edged, metallic, it was splendidly theatrical, hallucinatory harpsichord, fairground Bach, and all; unsettling, even frightening fun at its best. 

The Violin Concerto emerged in context as a microtonal dance of something between life and death, the first movement memerising in its difficulties and in Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s (and the LSO’s) despatch of them. A folklike, vibratoless solo ‘Aria’ constantly surprised as other, hocketing instruments joined in deft evasion of the conventional, emotional or otherwise. Ocarinas versus virtuosic violin; piccolo, percussion, and horns: the ‘weird ironic homelessness’ (Seth Brodsky) of this movement held us in its thrall. Its successor, the ‘Intermezzo’ sounded as if an electronic Prokofiev reverie; it is none of those things really, of course, but perhaps the ‘real’ has been overrated. Another passacaglia, here of shifting stillness, ensued, lengthy violin harmonic notes eventually rudely assailed, so as to turn things loudly inwards—then outwards. Shaping from all concerned, Roth as much as the soloist, showed both careful precision and febrile abandon. The finale’s virtuoso fireworks emerged as strangely (in a good sense) hardwon: a further mystery of the macabre. Kopatchinskaja’s own cadenza culminated in singing, whistling, stamping, and more—and not only from her. Leader Carmen Lauri joined her for an encore of the early (1950) violin duo Baladă şi joc, evoking more strongly than anything in the concerto a Bartókian, indeed Hungarian, past that soon would no longer be a desirable, or even conceivable, option for composition. 

As agile in his podium pirouette from receipt of applause to commence Beethoven’s Fifth, applause still ongoing, as in his musical direction, Roth offered us a first movement unquestionably fast by historical standards, yet without being hard-driven. (For the nth time, speed and tempo are not the same thing.) Crucially, Beethoven’s score throughout pulsed with life: a banal cliché, no doubt, but sometimes words are truly insufficient. This was not, nor would anyone have expected it to be, a Beethoven in the line of Furtwängler, Klemperer, Barenboim, et al.; it was clearly influenced by Roth’s work with his period-instrument orchestra, Les Siècles, perhaps especially in the ripe, fruity presence of the LSO woodwind. (Just how did that metamorphosis take place?) But there was no dogmatism, simply a different, sincerely held, and powerfully communicated view. The astonishing textural clarity we heard was not an end in itself, but a means to hear, to feel, musical process. Just as the move to the relative major for the second group inevitably—and irrespective of ‘intention’—sounded a moral as well as a ‘purely’ musical transformation, so did the necessity of further struggle in the recapitulation-as-second-development. The movement’s concision shocked and enthralled as it must, and if, at the close, I felt energy had triumphed over tragedy, or rather there had been a degree of dissociation, then not everything, even in Beethoven, is or need be Romanticism. 

In the second movement, flowing freely, articulation enhanced rather than detracting from the longer line. The martial, French Revolutionary quality to brass interventions was rich in resonance (of various kinds). Every section of the LSO played superbly, but the gorgeous sound of the cellos perhaps merits special mention. Again, this was a vivid communication of form and melodic line as one: wholly involving, as was the implacable, subjectively aware scherzo, whether first time around or in ghostly (here, perhaps ghostlier than I have ever heard) reprise. The sheer energy of contrapuntal outburst in the trio offered an excellent presentiment of the transition to the finale, which was yet not foreshadowed by that presentiment. Again, Roth’s way here was neither Wagnerian nor even especially post-Wagnerian, but that is not to say it lacked its own metaphysics or at least philosophy. At any rate, the sheer physical thrill of what unfolded had its own, perhaps more materialist tale to tell. Later transitions were just as seamless, which is of course not to say without import. This, then, was a reading of great cumulative power, to which the LSO appeared and sounded entirely committed throughout.

Hardenberger/Kopatchinskaja/LSO/Roth - Järventausta, Strauss, Grime, and Coll, 3 April 2022

Barbican Hall

Joel Järventausta: Sunfall (world premiere)
Strauss: Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, op.28
Helen Grime: Trumpet Concerto (world premiere)
Francisco Coll: Violin Concerto (UK premiere)
Strauss: Tod und Verklärung, op.24

Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)

Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)

London Symphony Orchestra

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

Three premieres, two of them world premieres, and a couple of Strauss tone poems. Add concerto soloists of the calibre of Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Håkan Hardenberger to the formidable team of the London Symphony Orchestra and François-Xavier Roth, and what is not to like? Nothing here, I think. Joel Järventausta’s Sunfall, apparently rooted in the composer’s synaesthetic response to the colour orange, made for an impressive opening piece, subdued first chords swiftly, rudely interrupted by a cataclysmic orchestral clap. That and other such contrasts in material were worked out in an atmosphere of unease and natural-world majesty. A keen ear for matching timbre and harmony, and for lone, fragile melodic against that atmospheric backdrop imparted a sense of the ultimate amorality of the sun and its light: it can give life, but it can also take it away. Increasing animation, even frenzy, returned us to a transformed wilderness. Chatter at its close—musical, yet speech—enhanced the enigma, but also the unapproachability of that giant fireball now departed.

I do not think it would do Sunfall any disservice to call it a contemporary tone-poem. At any rate, it was followed by the first of two supreme masterpieces of the genre. Till Eulenspiegel emerged in Roth and the LSO’s capable hands flexible, colourful, and wry as ever. It shared with its predecessor a clear sense of narrative, full of incident and clear of structure, though it was certainly not to be reduced to its programme. There was an idiomatic swing where called for, not so very far from Strauss’s waltz-king namesake. Throughout, Roth showed that, like the best Strauss conductors, he could ‘play’ the orchestra with ease. 

Helen Grime’s new Trumpet Concerto opened darkly, yet with a host of orchestral colours, harmonic and timbral, not entirely un-Bergian. From that, the trumpet emerged magically, before sinking once more into an orchestral cauldron that was itself home both to echoes and pre-echoes of Hardenberger’s wondrously spun solo thread. Motivic threads were knit tightly together in a way I am tempted to call Classical, though I do not wish to imply something backward-looking. And in truth, the method probably had little to do with such distant forebears, though the movement of particular lines more than once recalled to me the late music of Boulez. Fantastic descending orchestral spirals, scurrying, and more would surely have interested, even delighted, him. Hardenberger’s lightly worn virtuosity became all the more apparent, incited by magnificently idiomatic writing for the instrument. There was, moreover an ebbing and flowing melancholy to the trumpet, not remotely sentimental, but which rather seemed to bear witness, perhaps even to the troubled time in which it was written (and first performed). 

The opening éclat of Francisco Coll’s Violin Concerto, more angular rhythmically, heralded a kinship that may only have been of chance, but which in context spoke of twin conceptions of instrumental and orchestral fantasy, replete in this case with punctuating percussion. At any rate, we heard the music of two composers by now fully mature, even contemporary masters. (For me, it has been quite a thing to acquaint myself with their musical journeys over the past decade or so.) Kopatchinskaja’s explosive, full-blown virtuosity led the way towards a lyrical blooming that was not so much ‘traditional’, whatever that may mean, as intriguingly and, yes, movingly haunted by some of tradition’s ghosts. The first movement (‘Atomised’) close, with high-lying, silvery orchestral violins heightened a kinship I had already felt with Prokofiev: not ‘influence’, nor a model, but perhaps simply a sense that the two composers, mediated by Kopatchinskaja, might have something to say to one another. 

There was certainly a sense of magic, drawing one in, to the second movement ‘Hyperhymnia’ and its lyricism, both uneasy and (almost) easy, harmonic development propelling its motion. Indeed, the expressive nature of Coll’s harmonic language, never to be reduced to that of anything or anyone else, proved at times quite breathtaking. A section of almost neo-Mahlerian climaxes, not in language, but in preparation and spacing, led to a true cadenza of true, musical virtuosity, which in turn led us into a finale (‘Phase’) of great invention (for instance, a passage setting violin against double basses) and intensity. Passages of (relative) stasis and movement, of shifting colours, transformational rhythms, and ghosts in the machine, seemed as inspired by Kopatchinskaja’s playing as she by Coll’s writing.

Both concertos, indeed all the works so far heard, had been journeys of transformation. So too, of course, was Tod und Verklärung. Its ominous opening heart-beats, vividly pictorial and crucial to subsequent, motivic development, heightened rather than dignified the magic of life (and beyond). There was high-operatic drama, presented with polish, precision, and grand sweep. There were light and shade, including colours I had never fancied were there. There was harmonic richness too, all revealed in a full-bodied orchestral performance, with none of the thinness one sometimes hears in this work. The glow of final transfiguration was echt-Straussian and intensely moving.

Chamayou/LSO/Roth - Gossec, Saint-Saëns, and Beethoven, 11 November 2021

Barbican Hall

Gossec: Symphonie à 17 parties in F major, Rh 64
Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto no.2 in G minor, op.22
Beethoven: Symphony no.3 in E-flat major, op.55, ‘Eroica’

Bertrand Chamayou (piano)
London Symphony Orchestra
François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

 

François-Joseph Gossec lived a very long life during ‘interesting times’, born in 1734 in the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) and dying in Paris in 1829, just short of the July Revolution. His Symphonie à 17 parties was written under Napoleon, in 1809, so makes for an interesting companion piece to Beethoven’s Sinfonia Eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grande Uomo, its initial dedication (to Bonaparte) famously scratched out in fury in response to the First Consul’s self-elevation to the rank of Emperor. If closer comparison is beside the point—whatever the virtues of Gossec’s piece, it would pale if heard after Beethoven—then this was an excellent opportunity to hear a little-known work, with fine advocacy from François-Xavier Roth and the LSO, Bertrand Chamayou contributing a blistering account of Saint-Saëns’s Second Piano Concerto in between. 

Gossec’s Symphony immediately catches the ear with its grandly rhetorical opening bars, prior to what comes across to our ears as fond looking (listening?) back to the eighteenth century, unquestionably from the standpoint of a composer for French orchestras. (Gossec had founded the Concert des Amateurs in 1769, offering for twelve years a serious rival to the celebrated Concert Spirituel.) And that was only the introduction. The first movement as a whole proved colourful and theatrical, testament to the composer’s interest in concert and dramatic work alike (sacred music too). If the movement’s close relied heavily on tonic and dominant harmony, that in itself is hardly a fault; one might—many do—say the same of Beethoven. The Larghetto second movement showed some rather more surprising harmonic shifts, allied to a keen ear for colour as heard earlier. Such music can all too readily be rushed, but not here; nor did it drag. The minor-mode Minuetto (I should have guessed ‘scherzo’) came as a considerable surprise, both in itself and for its counterpoint. Split violins, as well as considerable LSO heft (twelve first violins down to five double basses), truly told, as did unmistakeably Gallic use of bassoons. The trio’s Harmoniemusik was attractive enough, though perhaps it outstayed its (symphonic) welcome. The finale again had a strong sense of the opera house to it. Some phrases sounded superficially Mozartian in themselves, but the construction is very different. 

Chamayou ensured a properly arresting opening to the Saint-Saëns Concerto, as if extemporising on Romantic memories of Bach—which, in a way, is very much what the composer is doing. The LSO’s response was equally, differently rhetorical, the first movement’s course meeting somewhere in between, broadly Lisztian. What some say of Liszt, I might wonder of Saint-Saëns; this movement does sound to me a little like an introduction to an introduction. I am probably missing the point, though, and there was no denying the superior quality of Chamayou’s pianism: glistening, melting, virile, double octaves and all. Fantasia-like swirling mists prior to the close proved mysteriously alluring. A sparkling, sprightly, even sprite-ly second movement began in Mendelssohnian vein, before moving in quite different directions. The tarantella finale sounded ambiguous, perhaps ambivalent, certainly a whirlwind. One could only marvel at the pianist’s technique and musicianship, Roth ever the alert, discerning accompanist. As an encore, we were treated to the Adagio from Haydn’s late Piano Sonata in C major, Hob.XVI:50. Rapt in its intensity, it benefited from a similar sense of the improvisatory, founded in attention to detail and command of line. I should love to hear more Haydn from Chamayou. 

The opening of the Eroica came as quite a culture shock (to me, at least). I do not think I have ever heard it so fast: presumably taken at the ever-controversial metronome marking. Roth’s musicianship won me over, though. This was a very different Beethoven from that of Wagner, Furtwängler, Klemperer, Barenboim, or a host of others. Of course it was, Colin Davis included. (It was under him, I think, that I last heard the LSO play this symphony.) But comparison, or for that matter contrast, is not the point here. Roth, anything but dogmatic, had his own vision and it worked splendidly. Ultimately, I missed a degree of grandeur, but here, in Beethoven’s first movement, not only did notes fly off the page; they fairly danced. There was, moreover, a fine sense of exploration to the development and what is in effect a second development (recapitulation). 

The Funeral March was brisk, if less (to my ears) iconoclastically so. Obsequies grew in stature, as if grief were approaching us from a distance. There was, fittingly for the programme, a strong sense of French Revolutionary processional. It was, perhaps, more Berlioz’s Beethoven than Wagner’s—and none the worse for it. Excellent woodwind solos (Olivier Stankiewicz’s oboe here first among equals) contributed to the greater whole. Counterpoint lay at the movement’s very heart; if sometimes I had wondered quite what was at stake in the first movement, here there was little doubt. Busy energy, born of detail and line, characterised the scherzo, the trio’s celebrated horns sounding with vernal freshness all the more welcome in dark November. Taken attacca, the finale constantly surprised, rethought in many ways by Roth. No variation was taken for granted, that for strings alone taken by solo instruments with strikingly ‘period’ tone. But that was a means to an expressive end, not an end in itself, the entry of the LSO’s woodwind creating all the greater contrast and later string vibrato far from parsimonious. It was exciting and coherent: neither quite what many would have expected, nor in any sense perverse. It was quite something (even to a die-hard Furtwänglerian such as yours truly).

And it was salutary to be reminded by Roth from the podium that Beethoven, here conducted by a Frenchman and played by an (international) British orchestra, was the most European of composers. ‘Vive l’Europe!’ as he said, to great applause. London needs to hear that more than ever right now.

Careddu/Kozhukhin/Deyneka/Boulez Ensemble/Roth - Boulez, 29 February 2020

Images: Peter Adamik

Pierre Boulez Saal

Boulez: Sonatine for flute and piano

Messagesquisse for solo cello and six cellos, arr. for violas by Christophe Desjardins

Éclat/Multiples

Silvia Careddu (flute)

Denis Kozhukhin (piano)

Yulia Deyneka (viola)

Boulez Ensemble

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

An excellent afternoon concert of works by Pierre Boulez opened with what may well be the best – certainly among the best – performance, live or recorded, of the flute and piano Sonatine I have heard, from Silvia Careddu and Denis Kozhukhin. Self-trans-form-ation, free yet determined, proved the ultimate answer to questions of form and per-form-ance alike. From the opening piano bars, harmonically a characteristic mix of Debussy and Schoenberg, yet never quite to be pinned down to them, through waves of sound, rising and vanishing into nothingness, and frenetic treading over hot toccata-coals, to a theatre of cruelty suggestive of highly irregular clockwork – until one listened and realised irregularity ran far deeper – here was a performance whose precision and depth truly astonished. Here was the white heat of inspiration, in work and performance alike. Kozhukhin showed that this was just as much music for the Steinway as Rachmaninov. Careddu’s endlessly divisible tonal variegation proved an object lesson in expressive range for an instrument sometimes, however unjustly, accused of its lack. The melodic salience of, say, a flute trill, thereafter taken up by the piano offered aural preparation for much of what was to come, an entry point to the Boulezian labyrinth; again, so long as one listened.

I confess to having been previously unaware of Christophe Dejardins’s viola version of Messagesquisse, its performance here dedicated by François-Xavier Roth and the Boulez Ensemble to the violist’s memory. It may seem a statement of the blindingly obvious to say how different it sounded, but it was the invitation to hear the same material differently that mattered. The viola shadow surrounding solo violist Yulia Deyneka seemed, at higher pitch, not only lighter but capable of further refraction – or at least that refraction was capable of further aural enquiry. Arnold Whittall’s characterisation of Boulez’s ‘modern classicism’ has rarely seemed more apt, albeit in friendly competition with a frenzied complexity and mysterious echoes that endured and, yes, further transformed themselves.

Éclat it says; and that is certainly how it opened with Joseph Houston on piano, and continued to open up further in fevered anticipation, even before the onset of its Multiples. There was visual and aural theatrical beauty in Roth’s numerical cues; likewise in the incitement of pitch, one by one, in Webern-like nouvelle Klangfarbenmelodie across the ensemble, aural acrostics already anticipating the late summation of sur Incises. Multiples brought veritable multiplication of new realities, no longer mere serial potentialities. Endlessly surprising, gateways to new soundworlds opened before our eyes and ears. That applied to the familiar as well as the unfamiliar: somehow a clarinet or a muted transport was heard – played too? – as if for the first time. The languor of suspended time, the perpetuation of a Messiaenesque cell, the wondrously variegated sound and procession of a viola consort at the work’s heart: those and so much more beguiled and transformed. ‘Music for the thinking ear’, to quote the motto of the hall to which Boulez gave his name.

Aimard/ Gürzenich Orchestra/Roth:.‘Alleyn Freyheit: Eine Beethoven-Séance’ – Mundry, Beethoven, Lachenmann, Filidei, and Zimmermann, 10 February 2020

Philharmonie, Cologne

Images: Holger Talinski

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

All music once was new: uncontroversial statement, one might have thought, however much one sometimes imagines having heard its particular strains before. ‘Es klang so alt und war doch so neu!’ as Hans Sachs muses to Walther of the latter’s melody. New music needs, after all, to be performed if not as if it were old music, then with at least as much commitment and understanding, both ‘in itself’ and of whence it has come. A celebrated concert, entirely Beethoven’s music, with no fewer than four world premieres, took place on 22 December 1808 at the Theater an der Wien, Beethoven both playing and conducting. How might we have heard it? We can never know – and probably should not want to, not least on account of what seems, given but a single rehearsal, to have been an unsurprisingly poor orchestral performance. We faint-hearted would-be-modernists can only marvel, however, at a programme that ran: Symphony no.6 (premiere); Ah, perfido; Mass in C major, ‘Gloria’; Piano Concerto no.4 (premiere); Symphony no.5 (premiere); Mass in C major, ‘Sanctus and Benedictus’; solo piano improvisation; Choral Fantasia (premiere).

There have been occasional repetitions of the programme of this particular ‘academy concert’, which experience will of course be entirely different from that of its first audience. Cologne, however, has presented something quite different for the composer’s anniversary year, a ‘new Beethoven Academy’, entitled ‘Alleyn Freyheit: Eine Beethoven-Séance’. The city’s Gürzenich Orchestra, Pierre-Laurent-Aimard, and François-Xavier Roth, invited us to this séance of freedom with what, through the offices of infidelity, may actually have proved in some senses a more faithful or at least imaginative recreation of its spirit. We were told nothing of the music to be performed other than its composers – and that pieces by Isabel Mundry and Francesco Filidel would receive their first performances. What we had heard would be revealed to us only at the end, on a programme insert to be collected as we left the hall. With that in mind, I have uniquely placed details at the close rather than the opening of this review, following not only that chronology but also that of Debussy in naming his piano Préludes. The impatient or merely curious are of course free to skip the following paragraphs, but I thought it might be more valuable to record my impressions as they came to me rather than to edit with inevitable hindsight. I thus took notes during the performance and shall make do with as little editing as possible, doing little more than turn them into full sentences (usually). The reader will have to take my word for it that I correctly identified Beethoven’s scores and matched composers to music. works by Helmut Lachenmann’s and Bernd Alois Zimmermann I knew; the others I could not possibly. However, after a little metaphorical head-scratching, I worked out that Isabel Mundry’s music – orchestral fragments, as I learned later on – was interspersed with Beethoven and Lachenmann. For what it is worth, I have also refrained from reading interviews and notes in the actual programme, although I shall certainly take a look after posting this.

A large orchestra, soloist, and conductor having assembled onstage, it was perhaps surprising – although what here would qualify as unsurprising – for the concert to open to the strains of the Moonlight Sonata, yet from afar. It made sense, though, if this were to be a retrospective appreciation of the composer, for this was not only from afar. A second pianist and Aimard began to collaborate with what we had heard – recorded, or was it? and for the soloist as such to assume his proper role. Immediately memories, ears, the imagination started to play tricks – as did orchestral percussion. Musicians turning, bowing their heads, and so on acknowledged the billing of choreographer Jörg Weinöhl. The orchestra grew, though it took longer for relatively conventional – non-extended? – techniques to be employed. There was no doubting, however, the éclat of Lachenmann’s contribution, nor of the orchestra’s performance, gradation of attacks and resonance both precise and visceral, waves of sound passing across the orchestra so as to send shivers down the spine.

A change in lighting (Bernd Purkrabek) heralded something different: a new piece, so it seemed, although not for long. [This, to avoid confusion, was the second of Mundry’s Fragments, Lachenmann having followed Beethoven.] It used both pianos and orchestra, calling on six horns and two oboes to stand; at least the choreography did. Then suddenly, without warning came something familiar yet strange: the introduction to the first movement of Beethoven’s First Symphony. Or was it? So disoriented had my expectations become that I found myself asked the occasional question about Beethoven’s scoring. (‘Did he really write that phrase for the flute?’ is one I recall, and afterwards recall Beethoven having been criticised for supposedly excessive use of wind in this work.) I think I was wrong to have done so, but to be enabled to listen critically in that way concerning music I allegedly know so well was a fascinating experience in itself. It was an unfashionably large orchestra we heard for this symphony, or however much of it we were going to hear – and all the better for it: it had bite and heft, colour and…

… then the light changed, downward orchestral glissandi were heard, and Aimard and his page-turner solemnly left the stage. So too did a number of other musicians from the orchestra, those six horns and two oboes included. This mysterious Mundry (?) interlude – was it a continuation of what we had heard previously? – led us to another Beethoven introduction, that of the Fourth Symphony, darkly expectant. This time, it was my sense of pitch that I did not quite trust. Was it at modern pitch? A nagging doubt remained. After all, I told myself as the exposition progressed, context is all: this means something different here and now, if indeed it ‘means’ anything at all. Departed wind players reappeared on the balcony above to signal to us friends nicht dieser Töne, but something again unexpected: the transition to the finale of the Fifth; and then the opening of the portals of heaven itself. Those trombones! The rest of the orchestra too, of course, not least the excellent Cologne timpanist, but those trombones: what a thrilling Beethovenian moment it was once more, ‘authentic’ in the best sense. I could after all be excited by this music again when conducted by someone other than Furtwängler, Klemperer, or Barenboim. (There are others, I admit, but a list would be beside the point right here.) Moreover, I could do so without the tonal preparation of the rest of the symphony, which I should otherwise have insisted was necessary. How long, I wondered, would it go on? When would it be transformed into something else? The scherzo reprise came and went; heaven reopened. Wind were again especially prominent, hinting perhaps at the contemporary music – to Beethoven – of French Revolutionary processionals. Was I merely romanticising? If I were, why should I not, given a tradition dating back at least so far as ETA Hoffmann? On this occasion, at least, we reached the end, thus signalling the interval.

Upon returning to the hall, it was clear that some audience members had left. My initial reaction was to wonder why, but perhaps just as valid a question would be ‘why not?’ It is difficult, for whatever this may be worth, to imagine that some did not in 1808 – and their departure did no harm to anyone. It was not the full orchestra that was back on stage, although Aimard was back. The opening piece [the fifth and final of Mundry’s Fragments] played with piano and orchestral response. Cellists, percussionists, others shone in ways traditional and not. [Alas my memory deserts me here with regard to precisely what.]  We were invited, even compelled, to listen and indeed to watch. Was that Aimard playing a ‘light’ version of Beethoven? It took me a few seconds to realise that such lightness, as ever with the Bagatelles, was largely deceptive; hearing them at the same time as other music, seeing them at the same time as other actions was undeniably strange. The orchestra, intriguingly, seemed at times almost asleep and needed to be roused.

‘Warmer’ lighting signalled an impending change; as if by magic, we were part way through the first movement of the Emperor Concerto, somewhere in the development, leading us to the recapitulation. Aimard offered some delightful leaning into phrases, blinding clarity too, not least in trills reminiscent of Pollini in his prime. Once the movement had come to a close, a further dialogue between piano and orchestra began, piano seemingly querying the chordal responses it received, responses that nevertheless led it – and us – away from Beethoven, whether we liked it or not, initial memories disintegrating. This different voice fashioned music to metamorphose into a new concertante work: hectic, rhythmically insistent, playing on the ruins of tonality with a fine sense of the sardonic that occasionally brought Prokofiev to mind. Childhood and even childish memories, clockwork machinations, other, darker remembrances of things past or imagined fascinated in a veritable riot of invention, after which Aimard left the stage. The second movement of the Seventh Symphony followed, as compelling a processional as ever, after which Aimard and missing orchestral players returned. The orchestra stood and the lights went down. There was, notably, no applause, although it seemed like a moment when there might have been. What was Aimard, seated, about to play?

It was the final movement [ultimately only part of it] of the final piano sonata, op.111, exalted yet also strangely exultant. Oddly, given the elements of choreography throughout, I started to wonder about the silhouetted organist’s head, sometimes still, sometimes moving, I saw to the side of the stage. Was it, too, part of the performance? It was difficult to see how, yet once seen, I could never quite forget my wondering. The music led without a break into something new – and yet perhaps not quite so new. By this stage, I had forgotten that Zimmermann was on the programme, and it took me again a little while to realise that this music, with its unnervingly oscillating opening, an oscillation seemingly retained yet transformed into a dialectic between precision and vagueness, was indeed what it was. So this was why an organist had appeared: for the horrific fragments of musical remembrance – how apt! – of Photoptosis. Yet there was no ‘O Freunde…’ moment; the finale to the Ninth had been revoked, as in Mann’s Doctor Faustus, or at least averted. Truly this was a nightmare from which we might never awake. Parsifal, The Nutcracker, and, for some reason the most unsettling, Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy took their bows, but for what? Did they, did the Bach and plainchant, ‘mean’ anything any more? Do we not hear them all now in the shadow of Beethoven, which is to say of our construction(s) of ‘Beethoven’? Does not all music, old and new, Beethoven’s included, stand in that shadow? As if it had not been with us all along, darkness fell.

Isabel Mundry: Orchestral Fragments to Beethoven I-V (2020, world premiere), interspersed with (and on occasion played simultaneously with):

          Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.14 in C-sharp minor, op.27 no.2, 1^st movement (1801)

          Lachenmann: Tableau (1988/9)

          Beethoven: Symphony no.1 in C major, op.21, 1^st movement to bar 109 (1800); Symphony no.4 in B-flat major, op.60, 1^st movement to bar 333 (1806); Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67, 3^rd movement from bar 324 and 4^th movement (1804-8); Bagatelles, op.119: nos 7,9, 10, and 11 (1820-22); Piano Concerto no.5 in E-flat major, op.73, 1^st movement from bar 258 (1809-10)

Francesco Filidei: Quasi una bagatella, for piano and orchestra (2019, world premiere)

Beethoven: Symphony no.7 in A major, op.92, 2^nd movement (1811-12); Piano Sonata no.32 in C minor, op.111, 2^nd movement to Variation IV (1821-2)

Zimmermann: Photoptosis (1968)

Dohr/MCO/Roth - Haydn, Martinů, and Ligeti, 15 December 2019

Kammermusiksaal, Berlin

Haydn: Symphony no.22 in E-flat major, ‘The Philosopher’

Martinů: Double Concerto for two string orchestras, piano, and timpani

Ligeti: Hamburg Concerto, for horn and chamber orchestra

Haydn: Symphony no.103 in E-flat major, ‘Drum-Roll’

Holger Groschopp (piano)

Stefan Dohr (horn)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

If anything can offer light in dark, dark times, it is music: not only music, but music such as this, performed such as this. Goodness knows if, let alone when, an Englishman such as I will be able to live in Berlin again once this stay comes to an end. As things stand, it feels that the lamps are going out all over the world, if less in this part of continental Europe than elsewhere. Shall we see them lit again in our lifetime? Who knows? Amidst such gloomy, frankly despairing thoughts, this concert from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and François-Xavier Roth proved just the tonic, even if it rendered all the more glaring the gulf between the cosmopolitan civilisation of Haydn and the way so much of the world has turned.

What could be more singular than Haydn’s Symphony no.22? Has any other symphony in recorded history had the scoring of strings, two French horns, and two cor anglais (if one prefers, English horns)? That particular singularity one noticed—how could one not?—from the outset, perhaps enhanced, even amplified by having violins, violas, and wind standing. But the processional quality to the ‘Adagio’ first movement, here as well-judged and vivid as the pilgrims’ march in Harold en Italie, is ultimately the more unusual, the more fascinating; and so it was here. Horns, French and English, engaged in dialogue as if this were versicle and response. Suspensions told, ‘naturally’, quite without exaggeration. Above all, the music developed, meaningfully and movingly: so long as one listened. The second movement, marked ‘Presto’, burst forth in bright, vigorous necessity: hungry in the best way, nourishing too. Above all—and how sorely this was needed for this listener at this time—it made me smile: not in the condescending ‘Papa Haydn’ way most of us have now consigned to the rubbish bin, but inspired by the invention and humanity not only of Haydn but of these wonderful, international musicians. ‘Revelatory’ is a word overused, but I cannot resist it to describe the MCO and Roth in the minuet: taken one-to-a-bar and it felt just right. The balance between courtly and something more rustic, yet still cultivated, once again felt spot on. Slight relaxation for the trio seemed inherent rather than imposed. Then came the finale, ‘Presto’ as only Haydn can be. Roth took it fast, yes, yet never harried the music. Natural horns crackled; cor anglais echoed; strings provided the ultimate engine of development as rigorous as it was joyful. Truly this was music-making to lift the spirits.

Bohuslav Martinů’s Double Concerto for two string orchestras, piano, and timpani—not ‘strong orchestras’, as my original typo had it, though on reflection...—comes from similarly dark times to ours, composed in Switzerland in 1938, the final page of the manuscript completed on the day the Munich Agreement was signed. It is difficult not to read the turbulence and tragedy of world events into the music; yesterday, for me at least, it proved impossible, although by the same token, it reminded me that such human flourishing should never be reduced to external influence and ultimately can never and will never be crushed. The first movement sounded urgent, incisive, troubled, controlled, its counterpart in Stravinsky’s subsequent Symphony in Three Movements very much Martinů’s offspring. Procedures and sounds evoked Bartók too: another salutary reminder of opposition to fascism. Anger was retained and transmuted in the second movement, accompanied now by the deepest of grief, whether voiced by piano (Holger Groschopp), strings, or both. How that grief told in present circumstances! The finale renewed the virtues of the opening movement, taking the forward in a jagged, mordant dance of death, culminating in grim apotheosis. Tragedy, then, in every sense of the word.  

And yet, onward we must go, however bleak and dark our prospects may seem. What better way to make that attempt than with the twin inventions of Ligeti and Haydn? Stefan Dohr joined an ensemble of outstanding MCO players, four natural horns (José Cicente Castelló, Jonathan Wegloop, José Miguel Asensi Marti, and Lionel Pointet) among them, for Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto, outstandingly led as ever by Roth. As Haydn laid before us an almost Newtonian tonal universe—not for nothing do many consider The Creation his supreme masterpiece of masterpieces—so Ligeti went beyond, to genuinely new discoveries, explaining: ‘In this piece I experimented with very unusual non-harmonic sound spectra. … By providing each horn or group of horns with different fundamentals I was able to construct novel sound spectra from the resulting overtones. These harmonies, which had never been used before, sound “weird” in relation to harmonic spectra. I developed both “weird” consonant and dissonant harmonies, with complex beats.’ The controlled mystery of the opening ‘Praeludium’—perhaps in its way a late-twentieth-century ‘Representation of Chaos’—seemed to tell us so much of what the work would be about. Moreover every note, ‘weird’ or not, told, as it might have done in Haydn, Webern, so many others from the great tradition with which Ligeti had far from entirely broken. The second of seven short movements, ‘Signale, Tanz, Choral,’ suggested an almost Benjaminian sense of play, first between horns, then between other instruments, not least the basset horns specifically chosen by the composer for enrichment and blend of sounds. A truly mesmerising solo duet from Dohr announced the three inner movements: ‘Aria, Askak, Hoketus’, ‘Solo, Intermezzo, Mixtur, Kanon’, and ‘Spectra’. An ensemble of untold yet controlled giddiness led us by the hand toward that fifth movement of near-Messiaensque sublimity. The closing ‘Capriccio’ and ‘Hymnus’ lived up fully to their names and yet equally expanded our understanding of them and their possibilities. For an encore, Dohr treated us to some of the finest playing and musicianship I have ever heard on any instrument, in a riveting Messiaen ‘Appel interstellaire’ from Des Canyons aux étoiles.

And so, we returned to Haydn and to E-flat major for the Drum-Roll Symphony, his penultimate, written more than thirty years later than the first symphony we had heard. Just as Ligeti’s work had, in context, picked up the importance of horns from Haydn, now Haydn picked up from Martinů aspecial role for timpani. Matthias Kelemen, beguilingly inventive without a hint of narcissism for his Intrada, was responded to in kind by cellos and others: a not dissimilar relationship of versicle and response from The Philosopher. Indeed, the first-movement introduction as a whole proved uncommonly dramatic, finding form in that drama as much as drama in that form. The exposition likewise presented Haydn both as single-minded and multi-voiced, an example for us all. Contrapuntal density and similar direction characterised a development section as full of surprises as the moment of return—whether one ‘knew’ or not. In the second movement—no sense whatsoever here of this being a slow movement—Roth’s swift tempo and lightness of texture did not in any sense preclude depth or exultancy. It was full of colour and delight, even—especially?—for someone such as me, who hears it so differently in his head. Matthew Truscott’s violin solo delighted equally; so too did a purpose that we only call Beethovenian because, quite frankly, it is, however much avant la lettre. I learned much from this and can say no better than that. The minuet witnessed a properly generative balance between the straightforward and sophisticated, echoed yet far from banally repeated in its trio. The controlled—that word again—helter-skelter of the finale offered kinship to Ligeti and a glint in the aural eye far from dissimilar, for both were surely the most European of composers. Haydn’s joy brought tears to my ears for a number of reasons. Catharsis, then, in humanism.